


Hagridden

by modestsphinx



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: ACAB, Angst, Character Study, Depression, Gen, Nightmares, No beta we die like archival assistants, The Beholding Fear Entity (The Magnus Archives), The Buried Fear Entity (The Magnus Archives), The Corruption Fear Entity (The Magnus Archives), The Dark Fear Entity (The Magnus Archives), The Desolation Fear Entity (The Magnus Archives), The End Fear Entity (The Magnus Archives), The Flesh Fear Entity (The Magnus Archives), The Hunt Fear Entity (The Magnus Archives), The Slaughter Fear Entity (The Magnus Archives), The Stranger Fear Entity (The Magnus Archives), The Web Fear Entity (The Magnus Archives), Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, and don't get excited it's only a passing reference to helen, borders on a prose poem at times because i was in a very odd mood
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-30
Updated: 2020-12-30
Packaged: 2021-03-11 03:55:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,979
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28428903
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/modestsphinx/pseuds/modestsphinx
Summary: Daisy has been marked by most, if not all, the Entities in her Hunting. Her former patron insulated her mind from the horror of her life, but it's not there anymore. Self-awareness brings growing pains. Set between her rescue from the Coffin and the day in the Panopticon (episodes 133 and 157, inclusive).
Relationships: Basira Hussain & Alice "Daisy" Tonner, Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist & Alice "Daisy" Tonner, Melanie King & Alice "Daisy" Tonner
Kudos: 6





	Hagridden

**Author's Note:**

> cw: nightmares (obviously), police brutality, depression, isolation, self-harm, minor gore and blood, corpses, self-loathing, minor depersonalization, usual triggers associated with tagged entities (mostly vague) 
> 
> I don't think anything's too explicit or drawn out but take care of yourselves and let me know if I ought to put anything else here or in the tags

Basira gives Daisy nightmares now. And the terrible thing is the shock she feels doesn't lie in the fact that it's happening at all, but in the logic of it. The ease with which both fearing Basira and fearing their alienation have come to her. They aren't her only nightmares, of course.

There are Buried nights. The Choke rises and grows in her lungs, in her mouth, in her mind, in her soul; it smothers everything. Those nights she wakes coughing bloody clay with scratch marks up and down her throat and chest. Sometimes they’re still bleeding. Then Daisy has to go to Basira’s or the Archives' cramped washroom and pick snags of her own flesh from under red-rimed fingernails. She has to pretend the pink water dripping down the enamel basin of the sink doesn't stir anything in her. And she has to try to go back to sleep.

There are Strange nights. Daisy wakes overwhelmed, synesthetic, and nauseated, without even a dreg of the blooded predator to orient her. She does her physical therapy to remember her limbs, the bone and too-little muscle that have carried her this far. She drinks scalding tea to remind herself that pain is internal, individual; it is not the shattering of reality’s fabric. She huddles into the corner of Jon’s office where she’s boxed in by the walls on two sides, by the desk and Jon’s chair on the others. Daisy listens to him play midwife to deformed horrors, delivering them from the past into the maw of his reviled god with only a burst of static and his own stern voice. It reminds her that she is mad only with sanity. That she is not alone. She catalogues the things that she has done that cannot be forgiven, and in doing so she remembers herself and her penance. She is always so very, very tired when it comes time to sleep again.

There are Slaughtered nights. Someone always wakes her before she can of her own accord when she dreams of Slaughter, of a thing that was flayed but never had skin, that weeps blood from everywhere and nowhere, that wails beautiful cruel music without a mouth. She is burning and vicious and shrieking when she is roused. Daisy cannot stay with whoever has woken her. She runs to broom closets and washrooms and private offices and, on one memorable occasion, Helen's corridors. There she curls on the ground and bites hard into the flesh of her knee (the ridged rings of bruises, blood blisters welling under her skin, are preferable to someone's larynx hanging stringy and wet from her teeth -- no matter what the song in her blood tells her), clutching her arms tightly-too-tightly around herself like a straitjacket. And she screams blood-red until she can weep.

There are Watchful nights. The other archival assistants had not had nightmares of their statements. An Eye cannot see inside itself, Jon said. But as Daisy remembers the deaths, the violence, the cruelty, the _Hunt_ that she has perpetrated, she watches the Archivist flicker in and out of the middle distance. He is always Watching Daisy, never her victims. Daisy never looks at them either. She should. When she wakes she goes to Jon's office (but only so soon as he is not recording) and sits on the ground next to his chair, tall enough to rest her head against his knee. They sit like this, silent, until Jon begins to twitch restlessly and reach for the tape recorder. Then she seeks out Basira, if the latter is not running away. (Basira believes she is running towards. Daisy knows she is not.) She won't want the feeble, mewling thing that was once her fellow soldier. But she won't send her away either. Daisy will sit and drink in the sight of the other woman's revulsion and anger as a sacrament.

There are Woven nights. On these nights she dreams not of spinnerets or mandibles, but of the cruelty of self-righteousness. Smug voices, confident voices, commanding voices. Voices telling her she was _right_. They echo cruelly and Daisy blares any noise she can to drown them out. Prompt a single stutter, a quaver. Once, Melanie comes upon her in one of these moods. She drags the taller woman to the roof of the Institute and the two scream until Daisy is closing to fainting. Melanie lets Daisy collapse against her and the two sit in silence for some time, a faint odor of blood and steel and animal musk rising from them. They never speak of it, but Daisy breathes more freely on the roof than anywhere else after that, able to briefly ignore the tugging on her will in so many directions. In one thing the metaphor of a Web fails Daisy for this Fear. It is not threads, strings, or webbing twined around that most precious muscle behind her ribs. Nothing so delicate and lacy. No, it is wire: strong and sharp. If she remains still, perhaps they will tighten enough for her to fall to bleeding pieces. It would be easier.

There are Hunted nights. She remembers the terrible moments in time, after a Hunt, when she would finally feel peaceful for so cruelly brief a time. As much savage glee as the pursuit gave her, and despite the tinge of irritation and frustrated energy when the prey had been cornered and claimed, there was a frantic and foreign intention in her actions. The impulse was born of her emotions, her grotesquely warped understanding of justice and the flare of her quick temper. But the response, the intrinsic knowledge that she _must_ course, _must_ catch, _must_ kill, -- or be run to earth in turn -- this obliges her to put on noise-cancelling headphones and cocoon herself in a weighted blanket, defying her newborn claustrophobia and curling up as tightly as she can manage in the fetal position. If her brutal lull invites ambush then it is no more than she deserves.

There are Unending nights. These dreams are both more and less troublesome; they inspire grief rather than fear. They are nights of cold, simple certainty. There is no peace or hope, but there is also no punishment or hellfire. If Daisy has a soul, if she ever had one, if there is something ugly and mangled and Hunting in its place, it makes no matter and serves no purpose. It has nowhere to go and no meaning. It has made her neither better nor worse. She tells no one that she wishes for its destruction. Jon, perhaps, would understand, but Daisy isn't sure she wants him to.

There are Rotting nights. These rate low for Daisy as she feels empowered to respond. No janitors have come to the Archives during her tenure at the Institute, if they ever did, but there is a broom-closet with cleaning supplies. She dilutes bleach insufficiently in a bucket and scrubs random surfaces in her little corner of living space until her depleted stamina fails her. Half-high, half-suffocated. She will lie there until Jon rouses from his recording stupor -- or Melanie or Basira, when they are there, notices the fumes -- and is coaxed or commanded into leaving. She revolts from contact after such nights, and sits two or three meters away from whoever is available to be shadowed. The phantom sensation of mouldering, almost spongy hands pulling her into them, embracing her with senseless affection, leaves a lingering nausea in its wake. Fawning corpses, not all of them human (but all of them more human than she believed when she killed them). She hasn't had such a nightmare during one of her now-rare nights at Basira's. This is probably for the best.

There are Fleshed nights, lumbering and hungry. They are difficult, because Daisy wakes with both a horror of skin and a need to confirm her body is still her own. She locks herself in a washroom and strips, examining every inch of her wasted, abused body. The alternately loose and pinched skin of rapid weight loss. Hollow eyes. Feeble, stick-thin limbs. The scars -- the many on her shins and knees from when something got in her way, the ones on her arms and back from those who fought back, a particularly alarming one tracing the left side of her clavicle and crossing her chest down to her navel. A mark from an early encounter with Slaughter. The flower-shaped scar on her shoulder. Even an appendectomy scar, which Daisy always moves absently to brush her fingers over before recollecting the night she has spent. She's often sick after that. She takes frigid showers to numb herself, wanting to be less aware of her own corporeality despite her relief that -- save what she has left with the Buried and the Hunt -- her flesh is still her own. When she dresses later, she will put on gloves first.

There are Desolate nights. They do not hold much terror for Daisy, except in the intrinsic sense of beholding the traces of a great cosmic horror. Daisy has a few people she cares for still, but nothing and no one is hers to lose. Jon shares a bizarre trauma bond with her; Melanie's strange, needling humor and general belligerence have inspired an awkward but sincere camaraderie; and Basira... Basira is Basira and a part of Daisy belongs to her even as she wishes she could want to reclaim it. She develops a disconcerting propensity to roam the archives and clutch others' insignificant personal items like lifelines for a few moments before recollecting herself and putting them back with a muttered apology to the owner. If they're present. A few marker pens Melanie doodled on her shoes with during one of her obligatory visits, or a delicate karambit she tries not to handle anymore. One of Basira's notepads, an ornamental pin with a broken clasp. Jon's stupid mug with the arms of a university he didn't attend, full of chewed-on pens. A pair of reading glasses he no longer needs. It has not occurred to Daisy to say anything to any of them, even when she looks into their living faces and sees only ash and blackened bone. Her vision blurs but she never cries.

There are Dark nights. They paralyze her. A terrible reminder of the _nothing_ of the Coffin, of the pressure of darkness, certainly. But also a reminder of what she has lost, of her feebleness. The preternatural awareness of the Hunt is gone, and she never feels this so keenly as on Dark nights. Never feels so much as if she's lost a limb, gone blind, been hobbled. The cruel knowledge that she has forgotten how to be human presses on her in the dead of night.

And then there are the nights she dreams of Basira, and Daisy would give anything to hurt differently. Basira was her friend, yes, but her more importantly her _partner_ , her ally, her helpmeet, her foil. (Her accomplice, her abettor, her enabler). But she is unwanted in her helpless shame, brought low equally by the terrible thing she had invited into herself -- and she had invited it, welcomed it, claimed the strength it offered -- and by its loss. Daisy knows she has changed, but can't reason out whether this makes their estrangement her fault or Basira's. She tries not to think of blame and guilt these days. She has no right or authority; to weigh, measure, and find another wanting would be the height of hypocrisy. And yet she is afraid of Basira: of what she is doing, of what she believes, of her newborn opacity to Daisy, of what the consequences of her disgust for weakness will make her do. It is no better on waking, for she has dreamt only the truth. Daisy lies motionless until well after the day has begun. What Lonely nights those are.

**Author's Note:**

> So. ACAB. ACA-fucking-B, HOWEVER. I don't believe in redemptive suffering and am fascinated by the psychology of Daisy and her relationships with Jon, Basira, and, to a lesser extent, Melanie. With regard to Basira, I never interpreted their relationship as romantic, partly because I think it makes Basira's excusal and condonation of Daisy's actions much less interesting -- I prefer the in-group/out-group angle. If you ship them this probably reads a little different, but I hope you got something out of it too!
> 
> No Vast or Spiral, for reasons that are mostly uninteresting, though I expect she's had some encounters.
> 
> (I also really think we should discuss manifestations of the Corruption that are in that abstract realm of twisted affection -- like with Vilakazi and the dog Agape -- where the recipient of the affection is the victim. 'Cause I could think of some that would fuck me up, that's for goddamn sure.)


End file.
